Polygon - The days of owning games are coming to an end.What EA is offering in this case is ephemeral, just like the games we buy
digitally through Sony and Microsoft and install directly on our hard
drives. One day the servers will go down, and the games will be gone. The
hardware will die. The companies will stop supporting these services and
they'll cease to host games. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
The digital coupons for content and games are a great deal for this
generation, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're buying anything
lasting.

We may complain about this in the comments, but the reality of the situation
is that this is the future we've built. We support this new age of limited
ownership, of products that exist at the pleasure of the publishers and
developers. We spend money on games and services, we prop up the minimum
viable products that we like and support their ongoing development. We talk
about convenience when we buy digitally, and we worry about things like
pre-loading so we can play the moment the game is out, but we're ultimately
discussing impermanence.

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NamecaF wrote on Jul 30, 2014, 05:02:I've been saying this since Steam arrived on the scene (and has taken off) but everyone seems to think it's the second coming or something. Maybe I'm just showing my age or maybe this generation doesn't really understand what "owning" something means, but we are headed in a really bad direction with the way software and games are heading.

Gaben said they have a kill switch for if they ever went out of business. They could release all purchases. Who knows if they would actually do it, though.

That would also need either to have the steam content servers still running, or only work with already downloaded purchases. Which, some of us downloading our entire steam catalog at this point seems like a disaster...